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In 2008, Castlight Health took on the formidable task of unmasking health care costs so that companies and their employees can make informed decisions, based on price as well as quality. Those prices, often shrouded in secrecy, are mostly the result of negotiations between insurers and health care providers, and can vary widely even within the same city.

Going up against entrenched interests is never easy, and Castlight has to perform a delicate dance, collaborating with insurers to pry loose the claims data it needs to serve its self-insured customers, while at the same time disrupting the status quo to stake its ground.

In a move that pushes Castlight further along that path, it has signed on Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, a Massachusetts-based not-for-profit health plan with 1.2 million members in three northeastern states. “Every health plan is interested in bending the cost curve,” says John Driscoll, president of Castlight.

It’s not entirely surprising that Castlight’s first payer customer is from Massachusetts, which has been at the forefront of health care reform. The state’s health care cost reduction bill, which passed last summer, bars health plans and providers from including provisions in their contracts that prevent disclosure of negotiated rates for medical procedures to their patients.

Aetna, UnitedHealth, and Cigna have offered their own tools to estimate costs for years, but it’s unclear how many of their members use them, and how complete their data is. Unlike Castlight, they are often bound by contracts with health care providers prohibiting them from disclosing prices. But thanks to competition from Castlight Health, Change Healthcare and others, they are getting better, says Suzanne Delbanco, executive director of Catalyst for Payment Reform, which represents large employers pushing for price transparency. And increasingly, payers who have viewed claims data as proprietary, are willing to let go of clauses that bar their customers from sharing them with a third party.

“Employers and consumers are demanding more information,” says Driscoll.